This week, we heard from Dean Giustini, UBC Biomedical Branch Librarian and Liaison librarian at UBC Faculty of Medicine, St. Paul’s and Vancouver hospitals .
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What motivated you do adopt/adapt/create open educational resources in your work?My motivation was a pedagogy of abundance and providing knowledge objects to students for free. As an academic librarian, I believe learning is accelerated by making the products of knowledge open and free
Can you tell us about the open education projects you have been working on?
I’m currently on study leave examining innovative forms of open scholarship, especially open science. What can librarians do for faculty, students and researchers in the sciences to support the transition to using more open forms of scholarship in the academy? This includes supporting projects to make the outputs of research such as lab notebooks, data and preprints more open. One of the big questions I have for myself, as an academic librarian, is what can I do to adopt open practices in my teaching and in my educational role at the university in an era of greater openness and transparency.
What benefits have you seen from using open educational resources in the classroom?
Over 10+ years, we had more than 30 million visitors to our wiki. Student librarians contributed to its creation and development and took what they learned in editing wiki entries into their professional work. Communal sharing and co-creating knowledge objects are skills we need in the information age.
What was the biggest challenge you faced and how did you overcome it?
Creating an open education tool or resource such as a wiki requires investments of time and contingency planning. What happens when OE content is challenged as to its accuracy or currency? Sometimes you have to accept the messiness and delays associated with creating something.
Do you have any advice for other faculty developing OER?
My advice is to evaluate your platform, software and systems support before going public. Consult our excellent librarians in this area at UBC Library. You’ll need advice and experts to consult through the development of your OER project.
Is there anything else you’d like to add about OER at UBC?
The University Library has a range of experts in open education but also in related areas such as scholarly communications, copyright and research that can provide useful perspectives.
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Thank you Dean for taking the time to participate!
